Reviewer:
10987654321
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May 9, 2023 Subject:
Kahn proves two types of nuclear deterrent exist, and we lack deterrence now
This is a very badly edited book which contains key arguments broken up out of sequence, not a masterly debunking of nuclear weapons effects exaggerations. First
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you must understand the popular understanding of nuclear effects. When Kahn's update to Clausewitz was first published, Glasstone's half baked 1957 "Effects of Nuclear Weapons", while similarly confused (like the effects of nuclear weapons discussions which are broken up in various chapters of "On Thermonuclear War", rather than properly assembled for clarity), at least contained a protective measures chapter (deleted from the 1977 Carter era appeasement edition) and photos proving the survival of a cheap earth-covered corrugated steel WW2 style "Anderson shelter" after the Nevada Teapot-MET shot in 1955, and also two photos of bulldozers etc surviving 30 psi peak overpressure protected from Teapot-MET shot in dirt cheap shallow open trench shelters! It also contained photos of wooden houses protected from fire by simply removing crumpled newspaper trash and firefighting an hour after the burst, at the 1953 Nevada test Upshot-Knothole ENCORE! The protective measures chapter (removed from the 1977 trash edition) also pointed out that you can hose off or sweep up fallout dust, and the radiation is shielded once it goes down the storm drain. No sweat. Kahn goes much further than Glasstone, but uses the same senile approach of burying his key arguments in a disjointed verbage of boring and self-contradictory whaffle. Every statement Glasstone makes about protective measures is followed by a contradictory statement to make the former confusing to the casual reader. Therefore, like the Bible, it "says all things to all men", and requires a lot of further research (the references are all meaningless, since the key graphs come from non-cited secret reports) to get the facts assembled. For example, Kahn argues in "On Thermonuclear War" (less dramatically though than in his harder hitting testimony to the 22-26 June 1959 US Congressional Hearings, "Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War"), that nuclear weapons effects are grossly exaggerated in the popular media, citing airship engineer Shute's fallout nonsense book, "On the Beach". Kahn then goes into a detailed explanation of how the radium dial painters needed a threshold of 10 microcuries of radium-226 and radium-228 in their bones for 20 years to get cancer, which translates to such a huge intake of nuclear war strontium-90 fallout that it's simply not a problem. (Rowlands afterwards studied thousands more radium dial painters, measuring their bones as they passed, and proved Kahn correct, a fact immediately covered up by the US Department of Energy, which was shocked by good news.) However, this misses the whole point that Shute made, which was that cobalt-60 fallout from a doomsday bomb could produce lethal global fallout. (A claim debunked by Britain's Operation Antler series at Maralinga in 1957, when cobalt added to a bomb came out in large pellets around the crater, not global fallout: the problem is that while strontium has a gaseous precursor in its fission product decay chain and so condenses on to very fine fallout particles, cobalt doesn't have a gaseous precursor and also has a high melting point of 1,495 °C, which exceeds that of silicate soil fallout particles, duh. So cobalt is ultra refractory, appearing in local fallout only, not to any significant extent in the slowly condensing tiny particles of global fallout. Kahn does not explain this, despite condemning Shute's book, so the reader is unconvinced!) The Russian communist propaganda machine of Hollywood which the drunk Joe McCarthy inflamed with a scatter-gun witchhunt made films of such fake nuclear weapons effects claims, "On the Beach" and also (after Kahn's book came out, and sneering at it's style), "Dr Strangelove", both referring to cobalt-60 nonsense (which even Glasstone fails to directly address in any of his triology of editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons). I've pointed out elsewhere that Kahn's error is not listing the conventional and nuclear-equivalent megatonnage of both world wars with detailed analysis of effects and recovery times in the various bombed countries and fronts in those wars. E.g., Germany received a couple of megatons of conventional bombs in WWII and when the correct damage scaling laws (including blast duration and radiation effects) are used, this scales to some thousands of equivalent megatons of high yield nuclear bombs. So you can do a direct comparison. The issue of surface burst fallout radiation is then analogous to whether Hitler's 12,000 tons tabun nerve gas stockpile was loaded on to bombers, V1 cruise missiles and V2 IRBM's. It wasn't! Instead, Kahn blew it by omitting the conventional and nuclear megatonnage from his table headed "Tragic but distinguishable postwar scenarios", and just correlating deaths to recovery times! He partially corrects this at the end of the book in an appendix. Really, as I've written elsewhere (on my blog started for pointing out the many problems in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which also reviews Kahn in great depth), On Thermonuclear War needs to be updated and properly edited to kill off all the anti-nuclear appeasement propaganda funded by Russia. Where Kahn does get it right, however, is in distinguishing two types of deterrence: TYPE 1 DETERRENCE = strategic nuclear weapons to deter other countervalue (city strikes) by enemy strategic nuclear weapons (a useless, vicious cycle, that would not, as Kahn clearly explains have deterred either world war, which were not SET OFF by city nuclear bombing, but ENDED by it, viz. Hiroshima and Nagasaki!). TYPE 2 DETERRENCE = low yield "tactical" nuclear weapons to deter the military invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939 (by Russia and Germany jointly, under their "non-aggression pact"!) by deterring the concentrations of force needed for such invasions. Type 2 deterrence alone is what you need for deter WWI and WWII wars which were triggered by invasions of third parties, not by the 1930s feared strategic gas, explosive and incendiary bombing of London (basically on a nuclear scale, since it predicted killing 3,000,000 Londoners in weeks, according to official nonsense war effects predictions used by Chamberlain to "justify" appeasing Nazis). In other words, Kahn condemns Type 1 Deterrence as incapable of deterring a world war, since it is incredible to threaten to put a nuclear bomb on Berlin or Moscow if Poland or Ukraine is invaded. Raising the nuclear threshold by withdrawing tactical weapons increases the risk of conventional invasions which can then escalate, like WWI, to nuclear strikes such as Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and then your "raising the nuclear threshold" is seen as garbage doubletalk. Kahn ridicules Type 1 Deterrence further by discussing a way to try to increase its credibility, loved by fools: increase the nuclear yield to gigatons, "Doomsday devices". Kahn then shows that if this is done, maybe by putting them under the sea to dump fallout on coastal cities, you just get a totally incredible deterrent and the enemy can still invade its neighbours and set off a world war. At some point you have got to admit the truth: Hitler's 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas "Doomsday machine" proved useless in 1945. Killing everyone is no solution to an invasion threat!
Reviewer:
LittleRoundTop
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July 28, 2020 Subject:
A Strange Kind of Love
Well, well; at last I get to meet Dr. Strangelove! Sun Tsu and Clausewitz notwithstanding, I doubt that there has ever been a book like this one. Mr.
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Kahn has a most agreeable, colloquial style, which keeps the reader chuckling between attacks of blood curdling horror. Don't get me wrong, this is a scholarly, thoroughgoing treatise on the effects of, and uses for, thermonuclear cataclysm. It is, however, not hard to see why Mr. Kahn was hoofed out of his think-tank, RAND (Research and Development), immediately this book saw the light of day. He doesn't see nukes as deterrent weapons only. Oh no, not a bit of it. By his lights, a 20 megaton device could be just what the doctor ordered to cure a case of over-the-line adventurism on the part of the Soviets or the Red Chinese. As for Strontium-90, Carbon-14 or Cesium-??? (I forget), well, as Stanley Kubrick, et al. put it in 1964, you really ought to "stop worrying and love the bomb!"
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